Rapturous Research

You may pity me, if you wish, but my compulsion is relatively mild. As a longtime publisher of scholarly and scientific reference works, I am addicted to looking things up.

I first heard the formal name of my condition at a panel discussion on the topic of historical fiction and its challenges. When somebody at the top table confessed to a case of research rapture, the smirks and knowing looks shared among the panelists made it abundantly clear that all of them had direct experience of this writerly phenomenon. And I, too, though unfamiliar with the term itself, knew immediately what it meant. If I may paraphrase various informal definitions that are to be found online, research rapture is something like this:

A state of enthusiasm or exaltation arising from the exhaustive study of a topic or period of history; the delightful but dangerous condition of becoming repeatedly sidetracked in following intriguing threads of information, or constantly searching for one more elusive fact.

My own susceptibility to this malady became all too apparent when I began to investigate its diagnostic ancestry. A thorough search of the Web failed to reveal the original coinage, though I noted an absence of online references before 2002.

I was intrigued to find the topic included in a list of “emotions” on a site called Psychology Wiki, though the actual entry had been deleted. Upon further inquiry, I discovered that one learned psychologist (let us call him Dr. Wise) had offered the following opinion in support of this decision: “I don’t think this is an actual phenom. I’d like another set of eyes on this, but I’d vote to delete the article.”

Not an actual phenomenon? I could assemble a small army of authors who would respectfully disagree with you, Dr. Wise.

Photo

Credit Eduardo Recife

In fact, I would take this conceptual exercise one step further, and suggest the following definitions of the writing and revision processes.

Writing [of a historical novel, etc.]. The process of overpopulating a narrative with ostensibly pertinent facts uncovered by the author while in a clinical state of research rapture.

Revision [of a historical novel, etc.]. The process of undoing the deleterious effects of research rapture.

This has been very much my own experience of writing fiction. For me, the first rapturous stirrings were experienced at a time when I convinced myself that I was really on to something, that my own hypothesis concerning (as it happens) the origins of the King Arthur stories might actually have some faint scholarly merit. My novel became not so much a fictional exercise as a process of discovery. Every new and abstruse piece of evidence that I unearthed caused me — along with my fictional protagonist, a British archaeologist — to keep digging.

No medieval snippet was too insignificant; no serendipitous accident of Welsh etymology too obscure. For the edification of my readership, I might easily include an analysis of the 12 battles of Arthur as recorded in the “Historia Brittonum,” with carefully reasoned arguments as to which of them were real historical events, and which were not. I could refer to a vigorous continuing scholarly debate concerning the possible Alano-Sarmatian origins of certain Arthurian motifs, like the sword and the grail. It would surely be important to discuss the intriguing idea that the names of certain British rivers, like the Thames and the Tamar and the Clyde, are not derived from the Celtic and Germanic languages that gave rise to the other place names of Britain, but are instead a throwback to a distant pre-Celtic British past. But how to fit it all in?

The true challenge, as I discovered in due course, was this: how to leave most of it out? How to draw judiciously on this incredible data resource to include just enough detail to intrigue and tantalize the reader, without bringing the narrative grinding to a halt?

I do have one idea to propose to my editor. Someone reminded me recently that the “Magic Tree House” books have accompanying research guides. Why could I not make one of these for my novel, and put back in all the stuff I had to take out? I don’t expect it would run to more than 2,000 pages.

Sean Pidgeon, the author of the novel “Finding Camlann,” is a reference publisher at John Wiley & Sons.

A version of this article appears in print on 01/06/2013, on page SR9 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Rapturous Research.

What's Next

Draft features essays by grammarians, historians, linguists, journalists, novelists and others on the art of writing — from the comma to the tweet to the novel — and why a well-crafted sentence matters more than ever in the digital age.